


avec les anges

by autumnsolstice9



Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-10-17 11:41:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20620454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autumnsolstice9/pseuds/autumnsolstice9
Summary: It is only when she is lying on her deathbed that Hiashi realizes he doesn’t know his daughter.





	avec les anges

**Author's Note:**

> title means "with angels"

It is only when she is lying on her deathbed that Hiashi realizes he doesn’t know his daughter. Her already pale face looks ghostly, and some part of him that has been long-dormant stirs, creating an ache in his chest.

Hinata is dying, and he cannot conjure up one good memory together.

Her sensei sits at her bed, holding her hand in a constant vigil, and he may be the Hyuuga clan head but he feels he is undeserving of being there. He is her father, but he is somehow intruding on a family moment that does not include himself. Kurenai, nearly nine months pregnant, barely gives him a glance when he enters the room, her gaze stuck on his daughter and her shaky breaths.

“Has she been here long?” he asks, and feels shame prickle through his body. He had found out about Hinata’s hospitalization not because he is her father, but because Neji, strong, unbreakable Neji, had come home near tears, Hanabi in tow. 

“Otou-sama,” Hanabi had cried, “Nee-chan… she collapsed… she’s dying.” Neji had refused to look at him, his hands clenched, jaw tight, as if daring him to say something dismissing of Hinata.

This is the first clear sign that he did not know his daughter, because he did not know that Neji or Hanabi cared enough to shed tears over her. The second comes when he realizes, belatedly, that he did not know she was in such poor health that a collapse was something to fear. The third sign comes in the hospital, where he sees the waiting room filled, most of the Inuzuka clan and half the Aburame present outside her door. The heirs to the Yamanaka, Nara, and Akimichi clan are also present-- powerful people, people there for his daughter, people who he knew through treaties and alliances but fragile Hinata knew through something deeper.

He refuses to say he feels awkward- he is the Hyuuga clan head, he is never awkward- but he feels unsure of himself, even when Kurenai does not turn her piercing gaze onto him. “She’s been sick,” the woman says, cheeks red and puffy from crying, “We thought we had more time.”

“How did this happen?” he bites out. Why was he kept in the dark? This was vital information for his clan. Hanabi would have to assume the role of heiress. It was something he had been planning for and had been training her for, but he had not been prepared for his careful schedule to be pushed so far ahead. Mentally, he shifted things around in his calendar, moving ‘name Hanabi as heiress’ closer, jotting down a note to plan funeral arrangements. 

Kurenai gives a tiny shrug, as if the motion takes more energy than she has to give. “The heart can only take so much.”

He has to stop himself from rolling his eyes. His foolish daughter, never thinking with her head, and now look. It’s gotten her killed. He scoffs a little at the information, and is then forced to meet the genjutsu mistress’ blood-red eyes.

“Don’t be dense. She’s had physical toll on her heart. Despite its name, Gentle Fist proves to be quite rough.” She narrows her eyes at him. “I’m sure you know about that, though.”

He can feel anger begin to boil in his veins. How dare this woman speak to him like that-- as if he was responsible for this. He remembers Neji’s death-wish for Hinata, and while it might have gone away over the years, it seems his nephew succeeded in his childish goal of killing the heiress. Fate has a funny way of working like that. He’s about to answer, but something prickles at the back of his mind. Hinata coughing up blood during training, Hinata blind from pushing herself too hard, Hinata taking hits that would make an adult stumble, yet getting back up when he told her to. Kurenai’s gaze is steely and does not waver when guilt trickles into his gut. She looks at him accusingly, and he is aware that the jury is not in his favor.

“How did this happen?” he repeats, some weariness seeping into his voice. He takes an open seat along the wall opposite Hinata’s bed, his folded hands in his lap his only defense against the truth.

“Neji happened. Missions happened. Pein happened. War happened. You happened,” she finally spits out, acid in her words. “Listen here, Hiashi Hyuuga. I will never forgive you for what you have done to this girl, my girl. I will never forgive you and I will never forget.”

“Is that a threat?” he asks, icy, ready to stage civil war next to his daughter’s deathbed. 

Kurenai, always so composed, the woman who made a career out of faking emotion, finally lets her mask disappear. Rage has found its way into the snarl on her lips, the narrowing of her eyes, the clench of her jaw. “You killed my daughter before she had a chance to really live. It’s more than a threat, Hyuuga-sama,” she says, vitriol for his title, “it’s a death sentence.”

“She is my daughter,” he shoots back, daring her to question him again, to threaten his life again.

“She was your prisoner,” she responds in kind, a hand coming out to slam on the armrest of her chair. 

His brother was freed from his cage in death, and in turn Hinata was put in. Give and take. It was the rule of the world, of the Hyuuga. Perhaps he was too tough on Hinata, perhaps he was too cold, too callous, but that is the past, and he is of the Hyuuga and of the sun and refuses to look anywhere but towards the future. 

Hinata stirs in her slumber, a twitch of her hand that captures his and Kurenai’s attention. The heart monitor gives pitiful beeps, the pallor of her skin as unnatural as her mother’s was in death. “How long does she have?” The fight has left him as quickly as it entered. His first-born, dying, his brother’s sacrifice for nothing. Hiashi’s every failure visible in each shallow breath his daughter takes.

“Days, at most,” Kurenai answers, back to watching Hinata’s blank face.

“There is nothing Tsunade-sama can do?”

A slow shake of the head. “No, we’ve been giving her routine healings since her genin days. There’s so much scar tissue, it’s hard to work around.”

Another thing he didn’t know about. He wonders how often Hinata would leave the compound after training to be healed, whether she staggered her way there, if the blood that fell on their training mats was also splattered around Konoha. Did the clan know? Did the clan think him evil for training her so hard, for preparing her for the evils of the world?

“She is my daughter,” Kurenai says, interrupting the morose silence that has settled between them, “She was my child from the day we met. I have brushed her hair and bandaged her cuts, have held her hand through sickness and through fear, have loved her and loved her and loved her until I was certain my love for her would destroy the Hyuuga clan and the village. She is my daughter who made me gifts for mother's day before I knew what being a mother is, who helped me through the pain of losing a husband, who painted her sister’s room and made my house a home. My daughter, my first daughter, the daughter I raised with my husband. Gone.”

The grief on her face is etched into deep lines, Kurenai’s hand shaking when she moves to capture a sob. Hiashi wonders when his devastation will set in, if it will set in. Will he stand at her funeral, emotionless, a father burying his daughter who he lost many years ago? His own hands do not shake, his heartbeat remains steady, and Hinata continues to breathe. “She is my daughter,” he repeats, reminding himself of what it means to be Hinata’s father, reminding himself that he has a right to be in the room. He is uncomfortable in Kurenai’s presence, hearing of her and Asuma raising Hinata, of someone he knows only by reputation having more claim to his daughter than he does. “Did Asuma-san care for her? Was she… comfortable in your home?”

Kurenai presses her lips tightly together, a thin line of disapproval. “We raised her. We let her laugh. We took her for dango, we took her swimming, we cleaned the blood she coughed up at night. She was our little girl. More Yuuhi than Sarutobi, more Sarutobi than Hyuuga, more Hyuuga than Yuuhi.”

He cannot remember Hinata’s laugh. He cannot remember her swimming. He cannot remember her coughing blood at night. He is suddenly jealous of the Uchiha, that they could imprint a memory forever, whereas he is left with nothing of his daughter. He cannot remember the last time he saw her-- a conversation about expectations, perhaps? Or another day of training together? Asuma, dead and buried in the ground, has the memory of Hinata’s laugh and Hiashi, still alive and present, does not. 

It stings, like the tap of gentle fist fingers against his chest. More Yuuhi than Sarutobi, more Sarutobi than Hyuuga, more Hyuuga than Yuuhi. A life of contradictions, his daughter living in the shadow of not one but three clans, unable to meet any of their expectations. It is harsh for him to even think, but if Hinata was surely not a good representation for any of their clans. A failure at gentle fist, mediocre at genjutsu, no strength like the Sarutobi. He wonders what it must be like, to live in the shadow of three renowned clans.

He wonders why she did not grow bitter or angry like the wretched Uchiha. Hinata, caught in the crossroads of legends, left to navigate the world. More Hyuuga than Sarutobi, kicked out by her own clan and indoctrinated into two others. More Hyuuga than Yuuhi, abandoned by her father and still so attached to the customs and ways he taught her. 

Hiashi spent so many years not looking and not seeing his daughter, pretending that she did not exist and was not an extension of himself. Now, he looks and looks and looks, but he cannot see. His daughter is pale in her bed, more Yuuhi than Sarutobi, more Sarutobi than Hyuuga, more Hyuuga than Yuuhi, more of the sun that makes flowers bloom than the rays that burn. It is too blinding to look at, but he stares at the girl laying in her deathbed--his daughter--and knows that even the byakugan cannot reveal her to him.

He doesn’t know his daughter. He takes vigil with Kurenai, his shadow stretching across her bed, and he aches.

**Author's Note:**

> cleaning out my draft folder. hope you all enjoy


End file.
